Stuart had hurried Nan to her car, and rushed back to the scene of the tragedy. He readily passed the lines of the police, who recognized him as the district attorney. The doctor reached the spot and Harriet was holding the dying boy's head in her lap. Stuart bent over her curiously and slowly asked: "You were not afraid to rush up here with your father and take that poor mangled thing in your arms?" "Of course not," she replied simply. "Papa says he's dying--nothing can be done for him. They've sent for an ambulance." The doctor stood staring at the dying boy and a tear had slowly gathered in his kindly eye. He pressed Stuart's arm and spoke in low tones: "I've made some big mistakes in my life, my boy. I'm just beginning to see them. I've read a new message in the flutter of this poor fellow's pulse. I'll not be slow to heed it." But Stuart stood watching with growing wonder Harriet's deft little hand brush the damp hair back from the poor disfigured face. CHAPTER XV CONFESSION The face of the dying boy haunted the doctor's imagination. With his eyes closed or open, at noon or alone at night the pity and the horror of his lonely death gripped him. A boy of twenty, weak, hungry, ragged, alone, had dared to lift his thin arm above his head and charge the entrenched authority of the civilized world. Was he, with other theorists, responsible for the mad act? He began to think that Tolstoy is right in his assertion that human progress is a march of ideas--and that the day of revolution by bloodshed has passed. He began to fear that his struggle with Bivens in his long-drawn and fiercely contested lawsuit was an act of the same essential quality of blind physical violence. He began to see that the real motive back of his struggle was hatred of the man--this little counter jumper, who had destroyed his business. It was the irony of such a fate that sunk its poisoned dagger into his heart. He faced the fact at last without flinching. He rose and paced the floor of his library for a half-hour with measured tread. He stopped suddenly and clenched his big fists instinctively. "I do hate him--with undying, everlasting hatred, and I pray God to give me greater strength to hate him more!" Again the picture of the pale, torn, blood-stained face, with its mute piteous appeal, rose before him. The anger slowly melted out of his heart and the old thought came back: "How rich is my life after all compared to his!" And then he made a mental inventory of his assets, with sad results. He had tried for a long time not to face those facts. But if he gave up the suit he must face them. He had identified this action at last with his faith in the very existence of justice. To realize that the element of personal hatred was the motive power back of it was a shock to the whole structure of his character.